Hanoi (VNA) – The steel industry is forecast to grow by 20-22percent in 2018, said Vice Chairman of the Vietnam Steel Association (VSA)Nguyen Van Sua.

Strongest growth will be seen in the production of hot rolled steel with 154percent, followed by welded steel pipe (15 percent), coloured galvanished steel(12 percent), construction steel (10 percent), and cold rolled steel (5percent).

A line-up of projects will be put into operation in 2018 like Hoa Phat Group’ssteel project in Quang Ngai province with capacity of 2 million tonnes peryear, Hoa Sen Group’s cold rolled steel production line in Binh Dinh provincewith capacity of 350,000 tonnes per year and three construction steel projectsof Pomina, Vietnam-Italia and Tung Ho companies which can produce over 1.8million tonnes a year.

Therefore, volumes of steel products will shoot up in the year. Production ofiron is expected to rise 75 percent against 2017 to 7,500 tonnes while that ofsteel billet will soar 14 percent to 14,000 tonnes.

To back the industry’s development, the VSA will proactively join in buildingnational technical standards for steel products, and devising trade defencemeasures to protect the domestic steel industry in the context of deep globalintegration, Sua said. Also, the association will keep a close watch on thedevelopments of foreign petitions and join hands with local steel firms andstate agencies to chalk out ways to carry out effective solutions to mitigatedamages.

Nghiem Xuan Da, Chairman of the Vietnam Steel Corporation (VNSteel) said that thelocal steel sector has seen strong growth in capacity, output and demand. Helaid stress on the State’s role in mapping out the master development plan forthe sector, attracting investment and building policies to promoteinternational cooperation. Meanwhile, it is crucial to branch out construction,shipbuilding, automobiles and engineering as those steel consuming sectors willdrive growth of the steel industry in the coming time, he noted.

Report from the VSA showed that over 22 million tonnes of steel were producedin 2017, up 23.5 percent from the previous year.

The country earned 3.64 billion USD from exporting 5.5 million tonnes of steelproducts, up 45.4 percent in value and 28.5 percent in value. Meanwhile, itspent 10.5 billion USD purchasing nearly 20 million tonnes of steel fromforeign countries, which reflected a rise of 13.2 percent in value and adecrease of 14.2 percent in the amount made in 2016.-VNA